Tag Archives: Emily Testa

Patience, Not Bravery: Darin Strauss

September 24, 2010 – 12:15 pm

In Half a Life, Darin Strauss begins by laying bare his story’s bones. What follows is a painstaking study of an excavated grief, one that is by turns stark, plaintive, and, yes, very brave.

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Personal Politics: Jennifer Vanderbes

August 20, 2010 – 1:53 pm


Jennifer Vanderbes is the kind of writer who makes the project of writing a novel seem like the noblest pursuit in the universe. The worlds she creates, both in 2003’s Easter Island and this month’s Strangers at the Feast, feel fully contemplated, completely explored, as though she would know anything you dared to ask about them, no matter how trivial. BOMBlog’s Emily Testa speaks to her about authenticity and adultery—specifically, how fiction needs more of one and a whole lot less of the other.

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Holding Serve: Nic Brown

July 1, 2010 – 12:34 pm

Nic Brown is the author of 2009’s Floodmarkers and now Doubles, a novel about a lapsed tennis player with unrealized dreams and a wife in a coma. The author spoke with BOMBlog’s Emily Testa about research, real-life characters, and writing the South.

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Submerged in Miami: Charlie Smith

May 19, 2010 – 2:06 pm

Charlie Smith has written nine books of poetry and six novels. This month’s Three Delays marks his first work of fiction in more than a decade. Hopscotching through decades and cities, from Venice to Istanbul to the porches of West Miami, Smith’s great adventure evades succinct or satisfying description.

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Dreaming Life: Keith Lee Morris

March 29, 2010 – 2:16 pm

With wit and heart, Keith Lee Morris’s stories explore the slippery nature of memory, its mutability and incompleteness. His characters are forever filling in the blanks, and where others might have to earn our empathy, they have it straightaway.

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